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Fast Company Reports Live From The September 10 Apple Announcement

Join Fast Company's Alice Truong, Mark Wilson, Kit Eaton, and Noah Robischon as they report live from Cupertino, Chicago, New York City, and beyond during Apple's next product announcement on September 10, 2013. Will Apple unveil an iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C? New iPads? Updated iMacs? Apple TV hardware? Or will Apple turn up the dial on iTunes Radio? Tune in with us on Tuesday at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern.

The iPhone 5C - for 5 colors - is available for pre-order starting September 13. It starts at $99 for the 16GB model (with contract). Why colors? And if you want to cover up that polycarbonate shell, there is a line of silicone cases with "precisely drilled holes" that align with the speakers. There are six colors, and it will retail for $29.

The iPhone 5S is available for pre-order starting September 20. It starts at $199 for the 16GB model and $399 for the 64GB model. It comes in gold, silver, and "Space Gray." There's a new chip inside that makes it twice as fast as previous model, a "motion coprocessor," as well as a vastly improved camera with two flashes, and a fingerprint sensor for unlocking the device. Should you be worried about the fingerprint sensor?

iOS 7 will be available for all Apple devices starting September 18th.

It's true, Alice. I've heard from Google that normal users don't use passwords. But Google developers are required to. It creates a disconnect between how designers/engineers understand their products and consumers use them, one Googleite complained to me.

Apple's Touch ID sensor scans your finger's "sub-eipdermal layers." That sounds an awful lot like this very clever sensing tech we wrote about recently, and it may even protect you by requiring your finger be alive!

There had always been products that had been beautifully designed. But they were high end, and very few people actually owned them. Apple was the first company that took high design and made it mainstream. It taught the world taste.

Okay guys, we've seen all your tongue-in-cheek (and perhaps genuinely worried) comments about the iPhone's fingerprint sensor powers and possible connections to the NSA and its ever-expanding snooping powers. Let's have a think about this.

Apple is smart, and they wouldn't risk their business on such a matter, so during the presentation of the new iPhone 5S they made a point of saying that no fingerprint data is shared to third party apps, nor is it sent to Apple or even indirectly sent to Apple when your phone backs-up its data over iCloud. Your fingerprint data is, instead, stored directly in the phone. When a third party app asks for a fingerprint, the iPhone isn't going to send your print to your bank, or wherever. It'll just send a signal to the app saying "yes, this is the user."

Furthermore, your fingerprint data is likely stored in the iPhone in a highly protected, coded manner, and matching the stored version to the fresh scan of your fingertip is going to be a lot like the way the Shazam app detects a piece of music by just listening to a tiny fragment of it.

Could the NSA snoop all the way into the guts of your phone to snaffle the encrypted fingerprint patterns stored there? It seems unlikely. Not impossible--of course--but unlikely.

And if you're actually worried about that, then you should probably think about all the workplaces that use fingerprint locks and business-friendly PC laptops that have had fingerprint sensors built into them for years. Is that data secure from surveillance? Let's stop over-thinking this, and instead concentrate on the security benefits, the potential for neat mobile payment options, as well as wondering if this will help lower iPhone theft.

1. Cases that complement colorful phones. Sure, they just poked holes in an iPhone 5C case so you could see the underlying colors, but it was a smart maneuver.

2. UIs that match the color of hardware. Each color of Apple's iPhone 5C comes with a complementing backdrop in iOS. And furthermore, note how the colors of the icons match the hardware.

3. Fingerprints. Every major phone is going to have a fingerprint sensor from here on out. And what that means for security and retail could be huge. As for what fingerprints mean for privacy, see Kit's note directly below.

I have nitpicks with iOS 7, but I'm really happy they did something big. It's more than just the veneer. The way they're reimplementing the UI framework with physics--it just feels natural. They're mimicking the real world. So in a way, the skeuomorphism, which was previously going into visual design, is now going into interaction design.